Setting and Oscar Wao

This pattern of opposing a scholarly and an informal voice in the footnotes changes

our assumptions about the function of history in Oscar Wao

by suggesting that even the official history is always underwritten and shaped by a more authentic voice; perhaps we are being instructed to find that personal voice in official history rather than replace it with personal imagination.

Setting and Oscar Wao

What is Setting?

• Setting includes the place, physical context and historical period in which the story takes place.
• An integral setting is essential to the plot; it influences action, character or theme.
• A backdrop setting is relatively unimportant to the plot; it is like the featureless curtain or flat painted scenery of a theater.
• Pathetic Fallacy: The assignment of human feelings to inanimate objects; emphasizes the relationship between the author’s emotional state and what he or she sees in the object or objects
• Setting can clarify conflict, illuminate character, affect the mood, and act as a symbol. The setting itself can be an antagonist in a person-against-nature conflict. (http://www.cas.usf.edu/lis/lis6585/class/litelem.html)

The Dominican Republic and Trujillo

• How well does the character fit within his or her physical and historical milieu?
• How is the character shaped by the time period and place in which he or she lives?
• How does setting influence the plot?
• Can you support your claims about setting with the text?
• How does understanding the setting help to understand the text?

• Is the setting important as background or as a key force in the story?
• What are the social, political, cultural and economic mores of the time?
• In what physical place is the story set?
• During what time of day is the story set?
• Is the story set inside or outside?
• What role does weather and atmosphere play in the story?

https://prezi.com/7hf5nbf3bsl-/the-dominican-republic/

• In 1916 the United States occupied the Dominican Republic in an attempt to establish a stable democracy.
• In the process, the U.S set up a Dominican National Guard and trained Dominican soldiers.
• In 1924, the United States pulled out after a somewhat successful election, leaving behind Rafael Trujillo as the head of the Dominican National Guard.

• Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.
• During his thirty one years of control, the people of the island of Hispaniola faced oppression and fear at the hands of Trujillo, his secret police, and his fellow cabinet members.
• Trujillo would not allow any opposition to his government and he went to any means necessary to keep his power. These means included assassinating any political opponent and imprisoning and torturing any citizen who spoke out against his government. The number of people who died in “accidents” or who just plain disappeared off the face of the earth was unnaturally high during the Tyranny of Trujillo.
• Trujillo instilled fear in the citizens of his country and forced them to surrender to his wants and needs.
• Throughout his dictatorship he amassed a large personal fortune by stealing people’s land and taking control of a large portion of the businesses and factories in his country.
• Trujillo, whose mother was supposedly 50% Haitian, ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians. This was a result of his racist views against the mostly black Haitians.

One Case Study: Las Hermanas Mirabal

date of death: November 25, 1960

So What?

Beli's alienation at school is surprisingly like La Inca deciding to send her to New York in terms of placement. By this, I mean the placement of the Mirabel sisters in the school incident is used to show how she is not protected or nurtured by any outside force and the same holds true in contrasting her the sisters in terms of her being sent to New York in terms of an emphasis on how vulnerable she is. Noticing this pattern of using the Mirabel sisters to suggest the ways in which no amount of fame or history can protect one from violence suggests that the whole history of Beli as the "third and final daughter of theFamily Cabral" and her history's connection to Oscar and Lola is also a part of this collation because it _also tries to suggest that their particular histories make them special, yet can not protect them in any real way.

The Mirabal sisters show up in a few key moments in Beli's story: when she first goes to school (El Redentor [The Redeemer]) and feels alienated and when La Inca, after Beli discovers the Gangster is married to Trujillo's sister and is beaten nearly to death by his henchmen (in a cane field on the side of the road-- like the sisters) and Trujillo is shot, contemplates sending her to New York, she thinks about the fact that not even the famous Mirabal sisters were safe from a being attacked.

What is the effect of history in protecting or explaining violence in Oscar Wao? How does it achieve that effect?

What is the significance of female stories to history in Oscar Wao?

What is the process by which women create change and revolution, according to Oscar Wao?

Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede Mirabal

set up, with their husbands, an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo

imprisoned and tortured for conspiring against Trujillo. The sisters were eventually released, while their husbands remained imprisoned

stopped on the road by some of Trujillo’s men after visiting husbands. Murdered in a field off the road; it was presented to the public as a car accident.

Footnote 7, Wao: "The Mirabal Sisters were the Great Martyrs of that period. Patria Mercedes, Minerva Argentina, and Antonia María—three beautiful sisters from Salcedo who resisted Trujillo and were murdered for it. (One of the main reasons why the

women from Salcedo have reputations for being so incredibly fierce, don't take shit from nobody, not even a Trujillo.) Their murders and the subsequent public outcry are believed by many to have signaled the official beginning of the end of the

Trujillato, the "tipping point," when folks finally decided enough was enough.

May 30, 1961 Rafael Trujillo was murdered in his car by a group of assassins

What is Intertextuality?

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html

So What?: Explaining the payoff of your thinking/ writing

Yunior’s historiography acts as an intervention against this official historiography, yet it is an imaginative reconstruction that can only take place in the literary realm, since traditional histories rely on what can be considered objective fact supported by accepted forms of evidence whereas Yunior’s history explicitly relies on imagination and invention.

Moncia Hanna, “Reassembling the Fragments”

intertextuality: quotation, plagiarism, allusion;

paratextuality: the relation between a text and its 'paratext' - that which surrounds the main body of the text - such as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, illustrations, dust jackets, etc.;

architextuality: designation of a text as part of a genre or genres (Genette refers to designation by the text itself, but this could also be applied to its framing by readers);

metatextuality: explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text (metatextuality can be hard to distinguish from the following category);

hypotextuality (Genette's term was hypertextuality): the relation between a text and a preceding 'hypotext' - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation).

• What other elements of paratext is Diaz uses in this book? For what purpose?
• How does Diaz use allusion to either alienate or include readers?
• What audiences seem to be implied by how the text uses and narrates history? What relations between audiences is Diaz developing?
• What audiences seem to be implied by how the text uses and narrates _____? What relations between audiences is Diaz developing?

• What sort of imagination and invention does Yunior's history use?
• What sort of outcomes does Yunior's history lead to?